My conversation with this episode’s guest, Sheree Renée Thomas, didn’t take place because we were attending the same convention, which is the way most of these chats happen, but out of pure serendipity.

Over on Facebook, someone in the group devoted to Capclave — a con where I’ve harvested many conversations for you — mentioned Thomas was scheduled to speak at Maryland’s Rockville Memorial Library. When I checked the details and saw the venue was only a 90-minute drive away, I reached out to see whether she’d have time in her schedule to grab lunch — and luckily she did. So early the same day as her presentation titled “Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi,” I scooped her up from her hotel and took her over to Commonwealth Indian Restaurant, where I’ve had many wonderful meals. Here’s how the event organizers described Thomas and her career —

New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Igynte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (October 2022), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian, and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.

We discussed how to prevent being an editor interfere with being a writer (and vice versa), the way a serendipitous encounter with Octavia Butler’s Kindred caused her to take her own writing more seriously and a copy of Black Enterprise magazine spurred her to move to New York, how her family’s relationship with Isaac Hayes nourished her creative dreams, the advice she gives young writers about the difference between the fantasy and reality of a writer’s life, how realizing the books she thought were out there weren’t launched her editing career, the rewards and challenges of taking over as editor for a 75-year old magazine, why she reads cover letters last, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us — (more…)

Irene and I drove to Ohio this week to take in the exhibition The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and while I enjoyed that part of our trip, what I was looking forward to the most was our visit to the neighborhood where Superman co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster met in 1930 when they were on the staff of the Glenville High School student newspaper.

And so, 85 years and one day after Action Comics #1 went on sale, introducing the world to the Man of Steel, an event without which I would not have had my life, we made a pilgrimage to two of the spots where it all began.

While Joe Shuster’s apartment building no longer exists, Jerry Siegel’s boyhood home still stands. So we started with a visit to 10622 Kimberly Avenue, which is a private residence. It’s obvious, from both the whimsical window dressing and the decorations surrounding the lot, that the current owners are well aware of the property’s importance.

I have no idea how many others make the journey to pay their respects, but we were the only ones gawking for the 15 of so minutes we were there.

The street signs at the corner of Kimberly and Parkwood also read Jerry Siegel Lane and Lois Lane.

We then drove nine blocks away to the vacant lot where the apartment building Joe Shuster lived in once stood, which is now a vacant lot. If you’d also like to visit this location, plug “Parkwood Drive and Amor Avenue” into your GPS. (more…)

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that whenever a comic book appears on screen in a movie or TV show set in the past, I’m immediately thrown out of the plot as I attempt to calculate whether the set decorator managed to get chronologically accurate comics.

That happened again tonight with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. The comics appear in a scene taking place February 8, 1969, which we know because we’re told that earlier in the day when we see Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in Musso & Frank.

Later that same day, we get a quick upside down glimpse of a couple of comic books in the trailer of stuntman Cliff Booth (that’s Brad Pitt’s character). By freezing the frame, I was able to identify them as Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes #66 and Kid Colt Outlaw #134.

Kid Colt Outlaw #134 is dated May 1967, and went on sale February 2, 1967, two years earlier. So … possible. But Sgt. Fury #66 is dated May 1969, and went on-sale May 4, 1969, about 3-1/2 weeks after the scene. Probably not possible — but this pedant declares it a good attempt.

I’m not 100% sure the Kid Colt comic would have survived two years in a trailer with that ginormous pit bull — or that Cliff Booth would have hung onto a comic book that long even if it had. But I’ll allow it. (I did say I’m a pedant when it comes to these things, remember?)